Book Image

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

By : Bhargav Srinivasa-Desikan
Book Image

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

By: Bhargav Srinivasa-Desikan

Overview of this book

Modern text analysis is now very accessible using Python and open source tools, so discover how you can now perform modern text analysis in this era of textual data. This book shows you how to use natural language processing, and computational linguistics algorithms, to make inferences and gain insights about data you have. These algorithms are based on statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. The tools to work with these algorithms are available to you right now - with Python, and tools like Gensim and spaCy. You'll start by learning about data cleaning, and then how to perform computational linguistics from first concepts. You're then ready to explore the more sophisticated areas of statistical NLP and deep learning using Python, with realistic language and text samples. You'll learn to tag, parse, and model text using the best tools. You'll gain hands-on knowledge of the best frameworks to use, and you'll know when to choose a tool like Gensim for topic models, and when to work with Keras for deep learning. This book balances theory and practical hands-on examples, so you can learn about and conduct your own natural language processing projects and computational linguistics. You'll discover the rich ecosystem of Python tools you have available to conduct NLP - and enter the interesting world of modern text analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

ChatBots


Getting a machine to learn to speak like a human being has been a holy grail for computer scientists as well as linguists – of all the things which machines can mimic human behavior, holding a conversation has been a challenging ordeal. The quest to make such a machine which can chat with us humans (or a chatbot, if you will), has had many different approaches, and while none of them work perfectly, it is important to be aware of them - and pick and choose which kind will be the best for our purpose!

As for why we would want to build them – chatbots are increasingly used by businesses; both to help customers to answer basic questions, as well as for building more complex personal assistants. It is also becoming increasingly easier to build such chatbots, and using open source tools.

There are many motivations to study the art of conversation for machines, from both a research perspective and a more practical approach. An ideal artificial intelligence bot should be able to remember...